How Summer Is Making U.S. Kids Dumber and Fatter

July 18 (Bloomberg) -- It’s July, and for many of us, that
brings back fond childhood memories of family vacations, summer
camp or long, happy days spent playing with friends. But this
quaint notion of summers as a kids’ paradise is dangerously
misleading, evidence from social research suggests.

After spending the summer away from the classroom, children
return to school one month or more, on average, behind where
they were when the previous year ended. Kids also tend to put on
weight in the summer two to three times faster than they do
during the school year.

To put it unkindly, the average child becomes dumber and
fatter during the vacation. And although there’s no need to
declare war on summer, there’s plenty we could do to combat the
seasonal learning loss and weight gain.

Consider, first, the evidence for the summer fade effect.
Taken together, a variety of studies indicate that students’
academic skills atrophy during the summer months by an amount
equivalent to what they learn in a third of a school year,
according to a review by Harris Cooper, a professor of education
at Duke University, and several co-authors.

This deterioration, furthermore, varies substantially by
income and race, and its impact persists even past childhood.
Barbara Heyns, a sociologist at New York University who studied
Atlanta schoolchildren in the late 1970s, found that although
academic gains during the school year were not substantially
correlated with income, summer decline was.

Subsequent studies have replicated the finding. Karl
Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Linda Olson of Johns Hopkins
University, for example, found that the summer fade can largely
explain why the gap in skills between children on either side of
the socioeconomic divide widens as students progress through
elementary school. Children from all backgrounds learn at
similar rates during the school year, but each summer students
of high socioeconomic status continue to learn while those of
low socioeconomic status fall behind.

The impact is felt even years later. The learning
differences that begin in grade school “substantially account”
for differences by socioeconomic status in high-school
graduation rates and in four-year college attendance, Alexander
and his co-authors report.

The summer increase in children’s body-mass index has also
been measured. In one study, Paul T. von Hippel, a sociologist
then at Ohio State University, and his co-authors found that the
average monthly gain in BMI for students moving from
kindergarten to first grade was two to three times as fast
during the summer as during either of the adjoining academic
years. And the children most prone to obesity were most likely
to put on additional weight during the summer.

So what can we do to fight summer learning loss and weight
gain and restore the season’s halcyon reputation?

Let’s start with the most ambitious option: lengthening the
school year. I have written previously about the benefit of
extending the hours of the school day. A similar argument
applies to extending the academic year: More time at task helps
children learn, and it would be worth the extra expense
involved.

(I can already hear the groans from some teachers -- even
if the prospect of a longer school year would mean higher
salaries. Having grown up in an academic family, I appreciate
the benefits of the summer break, but in fairness few other
professions get three months off.)

The second option is an idea proposed several years ago by
Alan Krueger, now the chairman of President Barack Obama’s
Council of Economic Advisers, and Molly Fifer, then a graduate
student in economics at Princeton University: Offer students in
kindergarten through fifth grade who qualify for free meals
through the National School Lunch Program the opportunity to
participate in a six-week summer enrichment program that would
be focused on small-group instruction. Krueger and Fifer
estimated that such a program would cost less than $2,000 per
student. If the federal government paid half, the cost to U.S.
taxpayers would be about $2 billion a year, and the benefits
would be worth much more.

Some educators are not waiting for the federal government
to act -- which appears to be wise, given the inertia in a
polarized Washington. For example, the National Summer Learning
Association, with private funding, recently began a three-year
“Smarter Summers” initiative in 10 cities, aimed at providing
high-quality summer instruction for 20,000 students.

The third and least ambitious option is to provide
voluntary summer reading programs for students of low
socioeconomic status. A randomized experiment conducted by James
Kim of Harvard University and Thomas White of the University of
Virginia showed that students developed better reading skills
when they were provided with books during the summer and
encouragement from teachers before the break began.

A voluntary summer reading program need not be expensive.
Yet it’s not enough to merely give children books; encouragement
from teachers and parents is also crucial. And for some
students, even that may not be sufficient; in another study, Kim
and Jonathan Guryan, then at the University of Chicago, found
that a reading program for low-income, Spanish-speaking Latino
children provided no measurable benefit in reading comprehension
or vocabulary.

July should be a time of activity -- for children and for
lawmakers. When Congress finally gets around to considering the
reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,
it should include an aggressive program to reverse summer
learning loss. Don’t bet on Congress fulfilling that assignment
this year, but we should hold them to it before school is out
for the summer of 2013.

(Peter Orszag is vice chairman of global banking at
Citigroup Inc. and a former director of the Office of Management
and Budget in the Obama administration. The opinions expressed
are his own.)

Today’s highlights: the editors on the amorality of banks and
ineffectual regulators, on the need for a tougher Syria policy
and on Republicans’ campaign-finance betrayal; Margaret Carlson
on politics as class warfare; Clive Crook on destructive
capitalism-bashing; Nell Minow on why letting CEOs lead their
own boards is like letting students grade their own exams.